Monday, November 05. 2012

Retaining the code name from Android 4.1, 4.2 is a revamped version of
Jelly Bean. Despite the lack of name change, 4.2 offers various new and
exciting features. Join us as we take a closer look at some of the
highlights!

Photo Sphere and Camera UI Improvements

Not too long ago, Google gave us native support for panoramic photos
with the launch of ICS. However, in their eyes, a standard panoramic
shot doesn’t properly convey the feeling of actually being there. Photo
Sphere takes us one step closer.

Once Photo Sphere mode is enabled, the app first guides you as you
move your device to capture the entire scene. By using the same
technology employed by Google Maps Street View, Photo Sphere then
stitches the shots into a 360-degree view that allows you to pan and
zoom, as you would in Street View. Those wishing to look at photo
spheres from photographers around the would can do so as well.

In addition to Photo Sphere, the Camera app’s UI also been updated
with gesture controls. Thanks to the gestures, the interface no longer
obscures the photo being taken with various controls. Instead, the app
now makes full use of the screen real estate so that you can take better
photos.

Gesture Typing

Taking a page from Swype’s play book, the new keyboard built into
Android 4.2 has slide gesture functionality. The heavily revised
keyboard differentiates itself from current versions of Swype, however,
by showing predictions in real time, as you slide around your fingers.

Well, it’s finally here. Multi-User support has finally made its way
to the OS officially. Each user is given his or her own personal space,
complete with a customized home screen, background, widgets, apps, and
games. While we don’t have access to the source code to verify, this is
likely accomplished by sectioning off the /data partition
between users. Interestingly, switching between user profiles is done
via fast user switching, rather than completely logging in and out.

Naturally, this feature is only available / practical on tablets, but
you can bet your bacon that this will find its way to phones in the
coming months, after 4.2 is released to AOSP.

TV Connect

Many were disappointed to learn that the Nexus Q was only able to stream Google Play content rather
than supporting full device mirroring. Problem, no more. In Android
4.2, users will be able to wirelessly mirror their displays to various
supported devices.

While we can’t speak in regards to additional functionality for
Google’s enigmatic black orb, we can say that this will truly be a
useful feature if executed properly. The underlying technology is the
new industry standard Miracast, which was created by the Wi-Fi Alliance, and is based on Wi-Fi Direct.

DayDream

A fun, new feature present in 4.2 allows your device to display photo albums, news, and more when your device is docked.

Quick Settings

Remember AP’s video showing
the “future site of quick settings?” It’s finally here. Google has now
added a separate panel to the notification bar that can be accessed by a
two-finger swipe from the top of the screen or simple button tap in the
upper right corner if the notification tray is extended. Once summoned,
it gives you quick access to user accounts, brightness, device
settings, WiFi, Airplane Mode, Bluetooth, Battery, and Wireless Display.

Lock Screen Widgets

Much as we have seen in third party applications,
Android now natively supports widgets on the lock screen. In fact, you
can now add several pages of widgets to your device’s lock screen,
essentially giving you a home screen—before you get to your home screen.
Memetastic.

Enhanced Google Now

Google Now was also updated with more cards. A good example of this
is how the software can pick out shipping updates and flight details
from your email, and display them in a context-relevant manner. This,
however, is not exclusively tied with the updated OS, as those with
devices running 4.1 can access the update today.

Monday, October 08. 2012

They told us, but we did not believe them: The Oct. 5 print edition of Entertainment Weekly,
which features a one-of-a-kind digital ad running video and live
tweets, actually has a smartphone inside of it. A real, full-sized 3G
cellphone inside a print magazine.

The digital ad is designed to promote the CW network’s fresh lineup of action shows (The Arrow and Emily Owens, M.D.)
and, when you open the magazine to the ad, the small LCD screen shows
short clips of the two shows and then switches to live tweets from CW’s Twitter account.

When we spoke to CW representatives earlier this week, they did tell us that “the ad is powered by a custom-built, smartphone-like Android
device with an LED screen and 3G connectivity; it was manufactured in
China.” This is all true, though the device is far more than just
“smartphone-like.”

During our teardown, we discovered a smartphone-sized battery, a full QWERTY keyboard hidden under black plastic tape, a T-Mobile 3G card, a camera, speaker and a live USB port that will accept a mini USB cable, which you can then plug into a computer and recharge the phone. We could also see from the motherboard that the smartphone was built by Foxconn. You may have heard of it.

Once we extracted the phone from its clear plastic housing (which was
sandwiched between two rather thick card-stock pages), we were able to
use a screw driver to close the open contacts on the touch pad and
access the on-screen Android menu, which has a full complement of apps.
It wasn’t easy, but we even made a phone call.

That’s right, there’s nothing wrong with this phone, other than it
being old, under powered and partially in Chinese. Oh, yes, and the fact
that it’s jammed inside a print magazine.

Mashable Senior Tech Analyst Christina Warren,
who assisted in our teardown, did some research (including using the
number on the motherboard) and is now fairly certain that guts come from
this $86 ABO smartphone. Don’t worry, it’s unlikely that it cost the CW anywhere near that much.

Entertainment Weekly is only producing 1,000 of these
digital advertising-enhanced issues, so if you want a nearly free
smartphone that, with a good deal of nudging, actually works, you better
run, not walk, to your nearest newsstand.

In the meantime, we’ll keep playing with the phone to see if we can
make it perform other tricks, like calling the phone number we desire
and crafting our own tweets. We did finally get the camera working, but
without a lens over it, the images are a blurry mess. More challenges
for what I’m officially naming our Entertainment Weekly Digital Ad/Smartphone Print Insert Hackathon!

True, as Tom Henderson, principal researcher for ExtremeLabs and a colleague, told me, there’s a “Schwarzschild
radius surrounding Apple. It’s not just a reality distortion field;
it’s a whole new dimension. Inside, time slows and light never escapes–
as time compresses to an amorphous mass.

“Coddled, stroked, and massaged,” Henderson continued, “Apple users
start to sincerely believe the distortions regarding the economic life,
the convenience, and the subtle beauties of their myriad products.
Unknowingly, they sacrifice their time, their money, their privacy, and
soon, their very souls. Comparing Apple with Android, the parallels to
Syria and North Korea come to mind, despot-led personality cults.”

I wouldn’t go that far. While I prefer Android, I can enjoy using iOS
devices as well. Besides, Android fans can be blind to its faults just
as much as the most besotted Apple fan.

You name an Android vendor-HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc. -and I can
find you a customer who can’t update their smartphone or tablet to the
latest and greatest version of the operating system. The techie Android
fanboy response to this problem is just “ROOT IT.” It’s not that easy.

First, the vast majority of Android users are as about as able to
root their smartphone as I am to run a marathon. Second, alternative
Android device firmwares don’t always work with every device. Even the
best of them, Cyanogen ICS, can have trouble with some devices.

Another issue is consistency. When you buy an iPhone or an iPad you
know exactly what the interface is going to work and look like. With
Android devices, you never know quite what you’re going to get. We talk
about ICS as if it’s one thing-and it is from a developer’s
viewpoint-but ICS on different phones such as the HTC One X doesn’t look or feel much like say the Samsung Galaxy S III.

A related issue is that the iOS interface is simply cleaner and more
user-friendly than any Android interface I’d yet to see. One of Apple’s
slogans is “It just works.” Well, actually sometimes it doesn’t work.
ITunes, for example, has been annoying me for years now. But, when it
comes to device interfaces, iOS does just work. Android implementations,
far too often, doesn’t.

So, yes, Android does more today than Apple’s iOS promises to do
tomorrow, but that’s only part of the story. The full story includes
that iOS is very polished and very closed, while Android is somewhat
messy and very open. To me, it’s that last bit-that Apple is purely
proprietary while Android is largely open source-based-that insures that
I’m going to continue to use Android devices.

Now, if only Google can get everyone on the same page with updates and the interface, I’ll be perfectly happy!

At the same time though Google did take Android in a direction that wasn’t compatible with the mainstream Linux kernel. AsGreg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the stable Linux kernelfor the Linux Foundation and head of theLinux Driver Project, wrote inAndroid and the Linux kernel community, “The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/androidsubdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model. In order to write a driver for hardware to work on Android, you need to properly integrate into this new lock, as well as sometimes the bizarre security model. Oh, and then there’s the totally-different framebuffer driver infrastructure as well.” That flew like a lead balloon in Android circles.

Over the last few months though, as Torvalds explained last fall, that while “there’s still a lot of merger to be done … eventually Android and Linux would come back to a common kernel, but it will probably not be for four to five years.” Kroah-Hartman added at the time that one problem is that “Google’s Android team is very small and over-subscribed to so they’re resource restrained It would be cheaper in the long run for them to work with us.” Torvalds then added that “We’re just going different directions for a while, but in the long run the sides will come together so I’m not worried.”

Things continued to go along much faster then anyone had foreseen. By December, Kroah-Hartman could write, “by the3.3 kernel release, the majority of the Android code will be merged, but more work is still left to do to better integrate the kernel and userspace portions in ways that are more palatable to the rest of the kernel community. That will take longer, but I don’t foresee any major issues involved.” He was right.

Today, you can compile the Android code in Linux 3.3 and it will boot. Still, as Kroah-Hartman warned,WakeLocks, still aren’t in the main kernel, but even that’s getting worked on. For all essential purposes, Android and Linux are back together again.

Thursday, March 15. 2012

Back in January, we talked a bit about the new MIT App Inventor
software aimed at helping people that aren’t developers to build their
own apps. MIT promised to have App Inventor available in Q1 of 2012.
The first quarter is quickly winding down, and it was looking a bit like
MIT might not make its self-imposed deadline.

MIT has now announced
that it is meeting the goal of making App Inventor available as a
public service in Q1. The App Inventor software has been in closed
testing the last two months with 5000 users. The App Inventor software
is now available in open beta to anyone who has a Google ID to login,
such as a Gmail account.

MIT points out that the software is suitable for any use, but users
need to be aware that this will be the first time the system is loaded
so heavily, which could cause issues. MIT suggests that users make
backups of important apps as the service ramps up with more and more
users, in case there are issues. MIT also notes that it is still working
on fixing remaining glitches and other errors.

We owe a large debt to our testers of the past few
months; it’s been their feedback that’s given us the confidence for
today’s announcement. And we’re tremendously grateful to the folks who
have been running their own system with the MIT JAR files. Their
experiences have been an invaluable source of information, and their
work has been critical in keeping App Inventor alive while the MIT
service was not yet available. We also want to acknowledge the growing
group of developers who are starting to explore the App Inventor source
code. They are the seeds of an open source community that we hope will
take App Inventor beyond anything we could do by ourselves at MIT. And
our extreme gratitude and admiration goes to the Google App Inventor
team who, even while their project transitions out of Google, have
continued to share their expertise and the fruit of their hard work of
the past three years.

Thursday, February 16. 2012

If you’re a fan of Google’s augmented reality astronomy app Google
Sky Map, I’ve got good news and bad news for you. Google announced that major development on the app has ended,
so there will be no more major official releases from the company. On
the plus side, they’ve decided to release the open-source code for Sky
Map, so given enough developer interest it should be around for quite
some time.

Sky Map started as one of Google’s famous 20% projects, which six of
its employees launched by working in their company-sponsored spare time.
The application was one of Android’s first showpiece apps, combining
basic astronomical data overlaid on a smartphone camera to easily
identify constellations, planets and other heavenly bodies by simply
pointing the phone towards the sky. The free app has been downloaded
over 10 million times from the Android Market.

Google is working with Carnegie Melon University so that its students
can continue direct development. The company didn’t say if direct
updated with computer scientist students’ code would make it into the
android Market, but it’s a pretty safe bet. If you’ d like to give it a
try for yourself, you can download the open-source code here.
I fully expect a Star Trek themed version of Sky Map in the next few
weeks which will allow me to view the Alpha Quadrant from my smartphone –
get to it, devs.

Friday, January 20. 2012

Another day, another set of Android fragmentation stories. And while
there’s no doubt that there is wide fragmentation within the platform,
and there’s not real solution in sight, I’m starting to wonder if Google
ever had a plan to prevent the platform for becoming a fragmented mess.

OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. Ice Cream
Sandwich is by all accounts very nice; but what good does that do app
developers, when according to Google’s own stats, 30% of all Android
devices are still running an OS that is 20 months old?

…

More than two-thirds of iOS users had upgraded to iOS 5 a mere three
months after its release. Anyone out there think that Ice Cream Sandwich
will crack the 20% mark on Google’s platform pie chart by March?

He then goes on to deliver the killer blow:

OS fragmentation is the single greatest problem Android
faces, and it’s only going to get worse. Android’s massive success over
the last year mean that there are now tens if not hundreds of millions
of users whose handset manufacturers and carriers may or may not allow
them to upgrade their OS someday; and the larger that number grows, the
more loath app developers will become to turn their back on them. That
unwillingness to use new features means Android apps will fall further
and further behind their iOS equivalents, unless Google manages – via
carrot, stick, or both – to coerce Android carriers and manufacturers to
prioritize OS upgrades.

OK, so Android is fragmented, and it’s a problem that Google doesn’t
seem willing to tackle. But the more I look at the Android platform and
the associated ecosystem, it makes me wonder if Google ever had any plan
(or for that matter intention) to control platform fragmentation.

I disagree with Kindel that that there’s nothing that Google can do
to at least try to discourage fragmentation. I believe that
one of Google’s strongest cards are Android users themselves. Look at
how enthusiastic iPhone and iPad owners are about iOS updates. They’re
enthusiastic because Apple tells them why they should be enthusiastic
about new updates. Compare this to Google’s approach to Android
customers. Google (or anyone else in the chain for that matter) doesn’t
seem to be doing much to get people fired up and enthusiastic about
Android. In fact, it seems to me the only message being given to Android
customers is ‘buy another Android handset.’

I understand that Google isn’t Apple and can’t seem to sway the
crowds in the same way, but it might start to help if the search giant
seemed to care about the OS. The absence of enthusiasm make the seem
Sphinx-like and uncaring. Why should anyone care about new Android
updates when Google itself doesn’t really seem all that excited? If
Google created a real demand for Android updates from the end users,
this would put put pressure on the handset makers and the carriers to
get updates in a timely fashion to users.

Make the users care about updates, and the people standing in the way of those updates will sit up and pay attention to things.

Personal comment:

Google with Android OS is now in a similar place than Microsoft with Windows, and blaming Google to have this disparity of OS versions would be the same than blaming Microsoft on the fact that Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are still co-existing nowadays. One reason Android got that 'fragged' is that it has to face a rapid evolution of hardware and new kind of devices in a very short time, somehow having a kind of Frankenstein-like experience with its Android creature. Many distinct hardware manufacturers adopt Android, develop their own GUI layer on top of it, making Google having a direct control on the spread of new Android version quite impossible... as each manufacturer may need to perform their own code update prior to propose a new version of Android on their own devices.

The direct comparison with iOS is a kind of unfair as Apple do have a rapid update cycle by controlling every single workings of the overall mechanism: SDK regular updates push developers to adopt new features and forget about old iOS versions and new iDevice's Apps request the end-user to upgrade their iOS version to the last one in order to be able to install new Apps. Meanwhile, Apple is having control on hardware design, production and evolution too, making the propagation of new iOS versions much easier and much faster than it is for Google with Android.

Then, mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) do have a short life timeline and this was already true prior Google and Apple starts acting in this market. So whatever your name is Google or Apple, considering not proposing the very last version of your OS on so-called 'old' or obsolete hardware is a kind of an obvious choice to do. This is not even a 'choice' but more a direct consequence of how fast technology is evolving nowadays.

Now, smartphones and tablets hardware capabilities will reach a 'standard' level to become 'mature' products (all smartphones/tablets do have cameras, video capabilities, editing capabilities etc...) which may make easier for Android to spread over on all devices in a similar version while hardware evolution observes a pause. Already Apple's last innovations are more linked to software than real hardware (r)evolution, so Android may take benefit of this in order to reduce the gap.

Wednesday, December 07. 2011

Recent Google engineering intern Andrew Munn has launched into a detailed explanation on Google+
as to why many Android devices are significantly more sluggish and less
responsive in terms of user interface and experience than comparable
iOS and Windows Phone 7 devices. The root of the problem? Inoptimal
priority queuing on Android OS. On one side, iOS has graphics rendering
queued as a real-time priority, thereby letting users self-manage which
priorities are to be rendered in the background. On the flip side,
Android views graphics rendering as a normal priority. As a result,
Android devices tend to become more sluggish when they’re trying to
perform other tasks simultaneously.

The gist of the problem boiled down by Munn:

It’s not GC pauses. It’s not because Android runs
bytecode and iOS runs native code. It’s because on iOS all UI rendering
occurs in a dedicated UI thread with real-time priority. On the other
hand, Android follows the traditional PC model of rendering occurring on
the main thread with normal priority.

Munn also broke it down in real world terms by providing the example
that if you put your finger on the screen of an iPhone or iPad and move
it around when it’s halfway through loading a complex web page like
Facebook, all rendering stops instantaneously. The website will
literally never load until your finger is removed, and this all boils
down to the fact that the “UI thread is intercepting all events and
rendering the UI at real-time priority.”

There are also some other reasons, like inoptimal hardware. The
NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPUs ubiquitous to many Android 3.0 tablets and some
phones suffered from low memory bandwidth and lacked NEON media
instructions, both of which ultimately presented a bottleneck to the
Android user interface and experience. However, Android 4.0 remedies
this by having graphics hardware acceleration, although as long as
graphics aren’t given top priority (a la real-time), platforms like iOS
or Windows Phone 7 are always going to be more fluid.

Monday, November 21. 2011

The rush to make computers smaller and smaller has been going on for some time now, but we may have a winner–at least for now–in terms of the small computer race. It’s called the Cotton Candy from FXI Tech, and though it just looks like yourstandard USBthumb drive, it turns out it’s packing an entire very small computer in its tiny packaging.

The specs, admittedly, aren’t anything truly spectacular, offering up a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 on the processor end, backed up by an ARM Mali-400MP GPU, wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a USB plug and a microSD card slot as well as its own Android operating system. But when you consider that it’s all encasedin a devicethat’s the size of a basic key chain, well, suddenly the whole picture looks a lot more interesting.

What this is designed to do is hook into much larger displays, thanks to that HDMI plug, and allow you to perform many of your basic computer functions. You’ve got Bluetooth for the peripherals, microSD for the storage, cloud access from the Android app…it’s a very simple, very basic, but extremely portable setup. And, you can even hook it into another computer with the USB plug included, which in turn will let you borrow the peripherals hooked into that computer (great if you needed to print something, I’d say) to do the various jobs you want done.

And if you want an ultra-small computer to take with you most anywhere you go, Cotton Candy should be on hand in time for Christmas 2012, and the pricing is expected to land at the $200 mark, which isn’t half bad. Though it does make me wonder why most wouldn’t just buy a full on laptop for not too much more, especially if they buy used.

Still though, an ultra-small PC for an ultra-small price tag is in the offing, so what do you guys think? Will the Cotton Candy catch on? Or will we be seeing these go for half that or less just to clear them out? No matter what you think, we love hearing from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1
up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update
that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor
support patch - as well as prices and release & discontinuation
dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping
version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty -
well, not for Android users:

Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today. If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:

7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.

12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.

10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.

11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.

13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.

15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.

In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.

At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

Also worth noting that each bar in the chart starts from the
first day of release - so it only gets worse for people who bought their
phone late in its sales period.

Why Is This So Bad?

This may be stating the obvious but there are at least three major reasons.

Consumers Get Screwed

Ever since the iPhone turned every smartphone into a blank slate, the
value of a phone is largely derived from the software it can run and
how well the phone can run it. When you’re making a 2 year commitment to
a device, it’d be nice to have some way to tell if the software was
going to be remotely current in a year or, heck, even a month. Turns out
that’s nearly impossible - here are two examples:

The Samsung Behold II on T-Mobile was the most expensive Android
phone ever and Samsung promoted that it would get a major update to
Eclair at least. But at launch the phone was already two major versions
behind — and then Samsung decided not to do the update after all, and it fell three major OS versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract today.

The Motorola Devour on Verizon launched with a Megan Fox Super Bowl ad, while reviews said it was “built to last and it delivers on features.”
As it turned out, the Devour shipped with an OS that was already
outdated. Before the next Super Bowl came around, it was three major
versions behind. Every one ever sold is still under contract until
sometime next year.

Developers Are Constrained

Besides the obvious platform fragmentation problems, consider this comparison: iOS developers, like Instapaper’s Marco Arment,
waited patiently until just this month to raise their apps’ minimum
requirement to the 11 month old iOS 4.2.1. They can do so knowing that
it’s been well over 3 years since anyone bought an iPhone that couldn’t
run that OS. If developers apply that same standard to Android, it will
be at least 2015 before they can start requiring 2010’s Gingerbread OS.
That’s because everyUScarrier is still selling - even just now introducing2
- smartphones that will almost certainly never run Gingerbread and
beyond. Further, those are phones still selling for actual upfront money
- I’m not even counting the generally even more outdated &
presumably much more popular free phones.

It seems this is one area the Android/Windows comparison holds up:
most app developers will end up targeting an ancient version of the OS
in order to maximize market reach.

Security Risks Loom

In the chart, the dashed line in the middle of each bar indicates how
long that phone was getting any kind of support updates - not just
major OS upgrades. The significant majority of models have received very
limited support after sales were discontinued. If a security or privacy
problem popped up in old versions of Android or its associated apps
(i.e. the browser), it’s hard to imagine that all of these
no-longer-supported phones would be updated. This is only less likely as
the number of phones that manufacturers would have to go back and deal
with increases: Motorola, Samsung, and HTC all have at least 20 models
each in the field already, each with a range of carriers that seemingly
have to be dealt with individually.

Why Don’t Android Phones Get Updated?

That’s a very good question. Obviously a big part of the problem is
that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the
carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to
devices. The hacker community (e.g. CyanogenMod, et cetera) has frequently managed to get these phones to run the newer operating systems, so it isn’t a hardware issue.

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3
that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the
OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale,
they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really
the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2
year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender
much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly
well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to
make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android
phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you
really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this
may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist - it’s entirely
possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad
management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).

A Price Observation

All of the even slightly cheaper phones are much worse than the
iPhone when it comes to OS support, but it’s interesting to note that
most of the phones on this list were actually not cheaper than the
iPhone when they were released. Unlike the iPhone however, the
“full-priced” phones are frequently discounted in subsequent months. So
the “low cost” phones that fueled Android’s generally accepted price
advantage in this period were basically either (a) cheaper from the
outset, and ergo likely outdated & terribly supported or (b)
purchased later in the phone’s lifecycle, and ergo likely outdated &
terribly supported.

Also, at any price point you’d better love your rebates. If you’re
financially constrained enough to be driven by upfront price, you can’t
be that excited about plunking down another $100 cash and waiting weeks
or more to get it back. And sometimes all you’re getting back is a “$100 Promotion Card” for your chosen provider. Needless to say, the iPhone has never had a rebate.

Along similar lines, a very small but perhaps telling point: the
price of every single Android phone I looked at ended with 99 cents -
something Apple has never done (the iPhone is $199, not $199.99). It’s
almost like a warning sign: you’re buying a platform that will
nickel-and-dime you with ads and undeletable bloatware, and it starts
with those 99 cents. And that damn rebate form they’re hoping you don’t
send in.

Notes on the chart and data

Why stop at June 2010?

I’m not going to. I do think that having 15 months or so of history
gives a good perspective on how a phone has been treated, but it’s also
just a labor issue - it takes a while to dredge through the various
sites to determine the history of each device. I plan to continue on and
might also try to publish the underlying table with references. I also
acknowledge that it’s possible I’ve missed something along the way.

Android Release Dates

For the major Android version release dates, I used the date at
which it was actually available on a normal phone you could get via
normal means. I did not use the earlier SDK release date, nor the date
at which ROMs, hacks, source, et cetera were available.

Outside the US

Finally, it’s worth noting that people outside the US have often had
it even worse. For example, the Nexus One didn’t go on sale in Europe
until 5 months after the US, the Droid/Milestone FroYo update happened
over 7 months later there, and the Cliq never got updated at all outside
of the US.